If I were to start playing on Red...
 

...are there any quality guilds currently accepting newbies? I'd likely be playing a Bard, so I could solo all the way if I have to, but I'd want people to at least hang out with in chat if not in game, and eventually would want to raid.

Green doesn't interest me, Red does, but there has to be enough of a community (for occasional grouping, trading, and eventually, raiding) to convince me to play on Red.

If you start out fresh on Red with no friends it will be hard to find groups, trading or raiding.
You'd have to start here, learn the ropes, stick around long enough to get to 50+ and make friends on the way.
You can join Sanctuary, which is a solid leveling guild but most of the time you are left to your own devices.

Yeah it's rough. I can't really help as I have one scrubby character. And no time.

The world's your oyster as a necromancer or chanter.

I ran into three highly successful bards during my last travels. They went from naked to spackled in diamonds by the time I scratched 51 and 180 int.

They changed some of the coding for bards solo ability shortly before I left.

Never played bard though, so you'd have to ask someone around here to see how much it actually changed things.

I'm pretty sure you can't kite huge groups of mobs like you could back in the day when this server was relevant.

Well I don't like swarm-kiting anyway. I prefer Fear-Kiting and some Mez-Melee.

I guess I can give it a try, what else have I got to do with my time right now. The leveling path wouldn't be too hard, I just need to make sure I'm maximizing my earnings as I go to afford necessities like 65HP rings and a couple of decent weapons.

It's fine u can even kite reasonably sized swarms, ur just going to get lvl 60 in 3 days instead of 2

Nah, I'm not gonna swarm-kite. I'll fear-kite, chant-mez, and mez-melee.

Well anyway, I have started a Bard on Red, Level 4 at the moment. I have a plan for how I'm going to go about my leveling, and hopefully have enough money set aside for the essentials around Level 17-20.

HP Rings
Two decent, cost-effective Bard weapons

Armor is debatable, but until I can get my strength up, I want lighter armor pieces to keep my weight down, so probably Reinforced. Working on a set of Leather at the moment.

And a cheap Haste item at some point, likely Swiftclaw Sash when I'm strong enough to solo that quest.